Love at Goon Park (47 page)

The fury over Harry's work started after his death. Sometimes, it seemed as if he had calculated that perfectly. “It's as if he sat down and said, ‘I'm not going to be around in another ten years. What I'd like to do then is leave a great big mess behind,'” Bill Mason says. Sometimes it seems timed to a different agenda, that animal activists knew they could do a better job of picking on a dead man. It's too bad, says Steve Suomi, because Harry would have loved the fight: “He was a person who was used to being controversial and he would have taken them to the cleaners.” Irwin Bernstein makes the same point. “Harry was targeted after his death. I've always thought of that as cowardice. He could have defended himself more than adequately in life.”

Further, Bernstein says, animal activists purposely exaggerate Harry's sins—they also describe brass-spike mother as having barbed points when she had only blunt knobs. Critics make it sound as if Harry had put every monkey in his lab into isolation, when it was only a carefully small number. Animal rights organizations give no credit to how seriously he took the welfare of his own animals. Duane Rumbaugh recalls that Harry thought the NIH cage-size requirements for adult monkeys were too small and built cages larger than required by the federal government.

Steve Suomi points out: “At the time that Harry was doing his mother love studies, the
standard
for housing primates in captivity,
be it in labs or zoos, was individual housing, in other words, partial social isolation, until Harry showed how devastating it really was. And it took a long time in some places—actually, most of NIH prior to my move there—before those standards were changed, usually over the strong protests of the veterinarians responsible for taking care of the captive monkeys and apes.”

Harry's experiments—and his vivid descriptions of them—may have invited his critics to take on what he did. Still, there's no doubt that some of their complaints are built on revisionist history. We may wish that the researchers of the mid-twentieth century shared our social consciousness. But the ethical questions that we raise about Harry Harlow's research designs are ethical questions that occurred later. For much of his career—barring the last isolation and depression studies—Harry was squarely in the mainstream of how scientists regarded research animals.

It's worth considering the exceptions, perhaps because it's too easy to gloss over moral issues by simply consigning them to history. The extremes of the Harlow lab did trouble people, even at the time. Psychology professor Kim Wallen, at Emory University, was a graduate student at Wisconsin in Harry's final years. Although Wallen didn't study under Harlow, he recalls the rippling sense of unease that the later work produced. “The view among other researchers was that you didn't need to put a monkey in a pit of despair to socially damage him. And yet as long as NIH funded the research, there was very little you could do. And maybe more than that, I don't think the ethical issues were generally raised or seen as a general concern in the 1970s. That just wasn't the case.”

Gary Griffin, now in administration at Waterloo University, was working on his master's degree in psychology in Harlow's lab at about the time the most severe isolation studies started. As he recalls, Harlow suggested that Griffin take on some of this work for his thesis. And he did. “We isolated the monkeys for three months, then looked to see how they'd developed socially, then we did six months of isolation.” Why six months? “Just seemed like a natural check point.”
The results were horrific; animals stumbling blindly around their cages, rocking themselves, chewing their skin open. Griffin began to hate what he was doing. “We achieved real devastation. They were difficult, painful studies for the monkeys and the people. Imagine any animal that you know a lot about, a cat or a dog, putting it in a cage for three months and allowing it no contact with anything. They survive but it isn't pleasant.” Griffin was troubled by a system that condoned such experiments: “I mumbled to Harry about the system but he made it clear that he wasn't interested.” Griffin continues to believe that Harry's work was important and that animal research is important and should continue. “But I personally don't want to do the work. There's value in the experiments, I don't regret being involved, but I've decided it's not for me.”

John Gluck, more than any of Harry's students, has tried to explore the ethical dilemmas raised by the specters of Harry's final experiments. “Harlow's colleagues, me included, never challenged him on the ethics points,” Gluck says, flatly and with regret. “The strengths of our spines were not sufficient to carry the weight of our professional goals and our conscience.” Harry was not the kind of professor to encourage such discussion; Griffin wasn't the only student, either, who was discouraged. Gluck doesn't hold his old professor responsible for that environment: “I am just saying that access to the moral resources, like empathy, comes from a community that sustains this kind of reflection. Harry neither created that type of community, nor did one emerge in the laboratory.”

“No one said stop,” says Marc Bekoff. “But Harry Harlow was very famous and you don't tell famous people to stop.”

Marc Bekoff is a professor of population biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He's also a scientist with a passionate belief that research must be moral and ethical in its treatment of research subjects, human and nonhuman. He works with the famed primate researcher Jane Goodall, trying to teach primate conservation. They co-founded Ethologists for Ethical Treatment of Animals (EETA), making the point that it isn't only outside activists who think that
animal welfare counts. Goodall and Bekoff are writing a book together; they're also making other scientists really angry.

Or at least, that's the impression Bekoff gets from the researchers who walk up to him at meetings and scold him. “They should feel good that it's people like me and Jane criticizing them. We're not against research. We ask questions, we try to not let people hide behind the veil of science,” Bekoff says.

He and Goodall were recently at an animal behavior meeting where she infuriated researchers by using the word “prison” for “cage.”

Bekoff's voice has a shrug to it; well, he says, cages
are
prisons. And “we're all accountable for what we do.” He's recently been writing angry editorials about a colleague who takes baby rats away from their mothers to test their stress response. The studies are, in fact, much like those conducted by Michael Meaney and Robert Sapolsky. “What bothers me almost more than Harry's first experiments is that they keep getting done all over again,” Bekoff says.

Bekoff lectures on Harry Frederick Harlow in his classes, but in a way that would undoubtedly startle the subject. He doesn't teach mother love or the magic of a hug. Bekoff asks his students whether the community of science should have allowed Harry's surrogate work to be done. And if you conclude that Harlow should never have done that work—never have taken baby monkeys from their mothers, caged them with air-blast mom, dropped them into vertical chambers—then, Bekoff says, the question of why such work continues becomes even more of an ethical dilemma.

“I find that Harry Harlow himself is not the major problem,” Bekoff adds. The work is over, it's done, you can't get the monkeys back. “But social deprivation falls into a category of work that should never be done again, with all respect to Harry Harlow, and even though he did not make a mistake in his own eyes, we do not need to keep repeating this.”

Martin Stephens found that isolation work peaked between 1965 and 1972. In those seven years, more than one hundred studies isolating
lab animals—not just monkeys but dogs and cats—were reported. The Harlow lab conducted nine of the studies cited by Stephens, which made it hard to argue that Harry was solely responsible for the whole world of mother-child separation experiments. Harry's real sin, in Bekoff's eyes, is that he gave the experiments a kind of power and legitimacy that keeps them going today. “I could spend my life damning Harry Harlow, but where would that get me?” Bekoff asks. “I'm looking for institutional change, proactive change, and right now what I see is that he's a consciousness-raising tool.”

The problem, Duane Rumbaugh says, is that animal activists have tunnel vision about the ethical issues raised by Harry's work. Yes, it's important to ask whether the work should have been done. But there's another set of ethical dilemmas that rise out of Harry's work, dilemmas that are equally important, equally troubling. And in Rumbaugh's opinion, these other issues aren't getting the attention they deserve. Monkeys are smart animals, really smart. Back in the 1930s and 1940s, Harry's work with the Wisconsin General Test Apparatus (WGTA) demonstrated that as emphatically as his cloth-mother studies would later make the connection between touch and love. And studies of primate intelligence have also gone far beyond the WGTA results. Rumbaugh himself has been instrumental in doing those studies across a range of species. He pioneered studies showing that chimpanzees could master the symbolic aspects of human language. He's shown that rhesus macaques can do simple math problems, play computer games—and even outscore their human trainers in shooting down digital targets on a screen. “The classic WGTA underestimates the rhesus by a 1,000 percent,” Rumbaugh declares. “I'm really sorry that Harry wasn't alive when we made those discoveries. He would have been ecstatic.”

But, Rumbaugh adds, our own society is still coming to terms with the bigger ethical questions raised by such discoveries. Should we conduct research on animals who are so smart, so socially complex, so closely related? In the primate family tree, rhesus macaques
sit an uncomfortably narrow genetic distance from humans. Scientists estimate they share about 92 percent of our genes, and you can argue that their sometimes astonishingly human-like capabilities—from curiosity to game playing, from mothering to friendship—may reflect that linkage. Shouldn't we then question the morality of caging and experimenting on our kin? It's easy to judge Harry in hindsight, Rumbaugh says, and it will be easy for others to judge us in the same way. “Harry was a captive of his times, as are we,” he says. “We, too, will be looked upon by future generations of scientists as less than sophisticated, less than human, less than sanguine. And they will be right. Of course, the generations that follow will hold the same of them.”

By this reckoning, you could also argue that Harry Harlow's work helped build the platform on which animal rightists now take their stance. He greatly added to our appreciation of the intelligence and the social complexity of other primates. His studies, directly and indirectly, helped create that sensitive social consciousness that we value today. Rumbaugh doesn't bother to deny Bekoff's complaint that science can seem to repeat itself endlessly. It does repeat, sometimes for no good reason and sometimes for the best of reasons. Repeating an experiment, confirming a finding and improving on it, is a fundamental part of the scientific process. In considering the moral implications, though, we might weigh other reasons for repetition. Perhaps scientific research is sometimes redundant because we are slow to get the point. Perhaps humans need redundancy because we have to hear something over and over before we learn it—or accept it. Long ago, Harry himself made the comment about our understanding of love, that even God had to accept that we learn at our own rate.

Should we be angry with Harry or with ourselves for being such very slow learners? Perhaps it takes the extreme example of the isolated monkey or the baby in the box to force us to see the right and the wrong. Robert Sapolsky raises that point eloquently in
Why Zebras Get Ulcers
when he considers the human species as it plods toward
an understanding of affection: “It is sad and pathetic when we must experiment on infant animals in order to be taught the importance of love. But it is sadder and more pathetic to consider that we have learned about love so poorly and still have to be reminded of its importance at every opportunity.” Living, loving, and learning are the most important parts of life, Harry Harlow wrote shortly before he left the University of Wisconsin. Learning never comes easy. And love is more difficult still. Yet we keep trying, those of us who have an inkling of what we're seeking. One more time, we tell ourselves, and perhaps we'll find the way.

The path to wisdom isn't well marked. There are plenty of signposts, but they're confusing, contradictory, humbling. So we turn to guides, those who can see a bit more clearly through the thicket, a bit farther into the distance. Harry Harlow—dispassionate, curious, and fearless in inquiry—was one of those guides. As objectively as he knew how to be, he underscored what should have been obvious, he insisted that good research should make sense, even on the emotional level. He wasn't perfect in the way he went about his work. It's impossible to like everything he did or the way he did it. In his zeal to explore even the ugly aspects of love, his experiments became ugly. Harry performed experiments that no one today should repeat. If ever there was a legitimate scientific need to put baby monkeys into vertical chambers, that need is past. Let us agree with Bekoff on this one. Once is more than enough.

But since we are so ridiculously slow, sometimes, to understand the lessons of love, perhaps we need to listen even to the most painful messages. No one who knows Harry's work could ever argue that babies do fine without companionship, that a caring mother doesn't matter, that we can thrive without ever being scooped up into someone's arms and reassured that the day is going to be all right. And since we—psychology as a profession, science as a whole, mothers and fathers and all of us—didn't fully believe that before Harry Harlow came along, then perhaps we needed—just once—to be smacked really hard with that truth so that we could never again
doubt. Let us remember the best of Harry's contributions as well as the worst. Let us not slip backwards, ever, into believing that we are not necessary to each other's health and happiness. You don't have to like the way Harry found his answers. Almost no one could admire every choice he made. But neither should we pretend that he did anything less than arrive at some fundamental truth. Our challenge is not to squander it.